Mouse (4):Values

It didn’t take Mouse long. He’s my most reliable and tenacious critic. He texted me, “A nice summary of the prevailing liberal wisdom about the failure of capitalism, Rey, but codswallop, just the same.” Mouse never uses Twitter. He reckons it’s for his customers, not for him. Besides, he doesn’t much like a lot of the people who are using it lately.

I called him back. “Tell me more, Mouse,” I said.

“Well, it’s not so much that you’ve gotten it wrong, Rey, but that you’ve only told half the story,” he said, “There has been a lot more going on in the last three hundred years than the rise of the propertied, learned, expert, busy-body, new middle class. Sure, we had the Renaissance, and the Reformation, which uncoupled art and religion from the ancient Church of Rome, but the key to the rise of the new economic participants was the rise of new industries, and new sources of economic influence outside the aristocracy and nobility. And this new gentry were not going to be denied. They created the Enlightenment, not the other way around. Reason was their Goddess, either in the way religion was turned toward each individual reasoning out the scriptures for themselves, or even going further towards a reason completely independent of faith: the kind of Goddess of Reason enshrined by the French revolution in place of the altar in Notre Dame.”

“But how is that different, Mouse?” I asked him.

“Because it implied that each person could or should be able to read and to reason,” he replied. “And it implied that each person was potentially equal to any other, not only in the sight of God and St Paul, but in everything. After all, if you can decide the most important questions, those about salvation, you can hardly be denied the opportunity to be part of other, lesser, political decisions.”

“OK, Mouse,” I said. “I get that.”

“But? I can hear you say ‘But’, Rey.”

“Yeah. But. But what did I leave out? That doesn’t seem like half, Mouse.”

“Right, Rey. The half that was left out was the half that all revolutions leave out. What is to replace what you are tearing down? They were tearing down the enchantment, the magic, the source of all deep feeling and valuing. But not replacing it with anything but reason.”

“But, and but again, Mouse, they knew that. There were all sorts of philosophes and savants digging into that.”

“But it is not in reason’s nature to give you enchantment, Rey. And have you ever noticed how the value systems that you can reason your way to are so…antiseptic? To make values stick and burrow in deep enough to actually motivate behaviour, they need to be learned in the family, and they start at your mother’s knee. Then the rest of the family, the neighbourhood, other families, the whole village. It takes a village, Rey.”

“Reason is a thin gruel compared to the rich sauce of family relationships, Rey. And relationships were gradually pushed back, from village to extended family to nuclear family, from sacred to your choice to secular, from sincerity to mere performance, from life being based on things beyond price to being about things that can be undone, denied, unfriended, with the touch of an icon. And you know what pushes everything back, Rey. Power and Wealth that captures the centre of society and places pressure on the village, and the family, and on the individual and robs them of their chance to prosper and flourish, damages their confidence and scorns their honesty.”

“OK. I see your point now, Mouse. You’re saying God and community have been replaced by spin.”

“Exactly, Rey. Spin now rules the world.”

“That’s so bleak, Mouse, and a self-serving thing for a spin doctor to say, if I may say so. It wasn’t like that when we were kids.”

“You’re right, Rey. All is not lost. Real values still survive in the strangest places. They always fight back. But when we were kids, they were much more abundant and self-sustaining, Rey. You remember that, Rey.”

“Yes, I do, Mouse.”

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3 Comments

Great conversation with Mouse. I seem to be reading this backwards at the moment? And who would be the twit or tweeter? Family values still seem strong here in Spain, or in these rural parts and elders looked up to and listened to, and more thoughtful newspapers.

Who is currently famous for tweeting? The current post is always at the top. That’s why I put numbers on them, so people can backtrack and follow the story from the beginning, although, to an extent, they are stand alone. No doubt there is a better way to do it, but I don’t know what it is.
Yes. Mouse’s main point is that in the enlightenment we threw out the baby with the bathwater, in the shiny hope that science would provide a complete way of life. I’m all for looking up to elders. I am one!

Thanks I think it’s my news feed on latest posts which is an odd app at times. But now with the current phase of tweeting and post truth perhaps there’s a baby that needs to grow up. Emotional literacy and numeracy may be needed and science which embraces our complexity as part of the animal kingdom!